Pat Garber

Pat Garber Bio

Pat Garber’s goal as a young girl was to grow up with lots of stories to tell, and she has done just that. A native of Short Pump, Virginia (not far from Richmond) Pat was raised on a farm with horses and a myriad array of other animals. She has degrees in Native American Studies and in Environmental Anthropology, and is a licensed teacher for the state of Virginia. She has been a federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator and a licensed volunteer with North Carolina’s Sea Turtle Stranding Network.

Pat has done just about every kind of job there is, from pushing a hot dog cart in San Francisco to milking cows on a dairy farm in western Washington; from serving pizzas in Bend, Oregon, to crewing on sailboats in the Bahamas; from teaching inner-city Head Start classes in Buffalo, New York to working as an archaeologist on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. She has been a wilderness trip leader at a rehab center for juvenile delinquents in Flagstaff, Arizona; a motel maid in Ocracoke, North Carolina; a soda jerk at an ice cream parlor in La Veta, Colorado; and executive director of the Ocracoke Preservation Society and Museum in Ocracoke. She taught for three years on the Havasupai Indian Reservation at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and served as project manager and script writer, in conjunction with Northern Arizona University and the Havasupai Tribe, for a video-documentary on Havasupai agriculture. She worked for the Environmental Protection Agency researching and writing a new policy for the Office of Pesticides and Toxic Substances to use on Indian lands. A singer-songwriter, she has performed with her guitar at coffee houses, art openings, and protest gatherings. All of these experiences are incorporated into her books and stories.

Pat has been writing for newspapers and magazines in North Carolina, Arizona, and Colorado since 1990, including nature and history features. An award-winning nature column called “From Sea to Sound” was published by the Island Breeze in Hatteras, NC, 1990 to 1999. A history column, "Untold Story" ran in the Nogales International in Nogales, AZ in 2008 and 2009, and a nature column called "From Mountain to Prairie" in the Huerfano World Journal in Walsenburg, CO in 20013.

Her first book, "Ocracoke Wild," was published in 1995, and she has since written twelve books on a variety of subjects and settings. "My Shining Palace," describes her first year on Ocracoke and the last, in which she and the island have struggled to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Dorian. She has several children's books, all illustrated with her own home-spun drawings and watercolors.

Pat, having lost her Ocracoke Island home to Hurricane Dorian in 2019, now lives in Goochland, Virginia, near where she grew up. She also calls home the Adirondack Mountains of upstate NY and sometimes the open road. She remains passionate about her friends and family, her work with animals, and her writing. Look out for her next book, due to be released soon.

Books by Pat Garber

Ocracoke Wild; A Naturalist's Year on an Outer Banks Island; 1995

Ocracoke Odyssey; A Naturalist's Reflections on her Home by the Sea; 1999

Little Sea Horse and the Story of the Ocracoke Ponies; 2005

Heart Like a River; the Story of Confederate Sgt-Major Newsom Edward Jenkins; 2011

Paws and Tales; A Novel Set on Ocracoke Island; 2014

Little Matey; Blackbeard the Pirate's Cat; 2018

The View from the Back of a Whale; Poems and Selected Prose; 2018

Glenmore Farm: An intimate look at life on a Virginia farm; 2019

Westward Bound; Settling the Arizona Territory--One family's amazing journey west; 2019

Letters from Old Bone; an Unsolved Mystery from the Civil War; 2020

My Shining Palace; A love song to Ocracoke Island 1985 and 2019

The Sanford Story,2022

Beneath Northern Lights; a heart-rending, heart-warming, whackadoodle trek across Newfoundland and Labrador, 2022

In Georgia O'Keefe's Back Yard; a Northern New Mexico Adventure, 2023

An Ocracoke Fairytale, 2023

McCoy the Pintail Decoy; a make-believe tale of love and heroism, 2023